ABOUT

What's the idea

First Political Memory aims to reconnect people’s everyday lives with politics through collecting and sharing stories of when people first became aware of the bigger world around them.

Everyone has political memories, but they are usually not part of our everyday vocabulary. While politics affects us in all aspects of our lives, the latest research continues to confirm that many people feel disconnected from the political process and wider civic society. We hope that the First Political Memory project will act as a tool to increase people’s interest in politics and open up new spaces to discover history, memory, and the ability to make a difference.

The story behind the project

It started with five friends sharing stories over lunch and a shared fascination with the untold stories of our lives. It evolved from there: an ongoing process of drawing in more people, venturing into the community, capturing people’s memories on the streets of London, from Hackney Fields to Green Park, and running discussion groups and workshops with young and old to elicit real, first hand memories to encourage debate about how politics inspires and affects us on an everyday level.

Today, the First Political Memory website houses a collection of fascinating stories, hilarious anecdotes, and moving recollections of ordinary people as well as people in the public eye, from the United Kingdom and further afield. Many people are taken right back to their childhoods, while others remember their first political awakenings. Sometimes news events have affected people personally – and sometimes people are the news. This bank of memories bears testimony to how each of our lives is intertwined in a bigger story – that of politics, history and world events.